Rachel Maddow Dissects the New Militarism in 'Drift'

Half a century ago, writing in a book called Military Organization and Society, a scholar named Stanislav Andreski surveyed the ongoing Cold War and observed that the two contending superpowers were becoming more and more alike. Soviet kids may have been listening to the Beatles, but at the same time, the folks inside the Pentagon were starting to behave more like the Politburo than Patrick Henry.

Read more new and notable nonfiction books this month.

Can a society that’s armed to the teeth, thoroughly militarized, worshipful of all things martial and constantly looking for a fight be anything but ...

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5 Hollywood Books for Oscar Season

The 84^th Annual Academy Awards are nearly here, and while many of us may be pondering if George Clooney will snag that Oscar or not, it also brought to mind some great Hollywood reads—books that go into the nitty-gritty business of show business.

Read more about excellent new memoirs.

One thing is for sure, from its beginnings a century ago, Hollywood has generated a huge library of books, written by players and backstage types, major and minor. Here, for starters, are five worth reading.

Julia Phillips, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again (Random House, 1991 ...

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A Better Future with ‘Abundance’

“The future is here,” sci-fi author William Gibson famously said. “It’s just not evenly distributed.”

In some visions, it’s not fairly distributed either and definitely not very nice. It’s a mainstay of science fiction and science fact alike to conjecture a future world in which only the very few have the resources to live well on a ravaged planet—or ravaged otherworlds—while the bulk of humankind lives like the people of Los Angeles in Blade Runner—in other words, much like we live today, if turned up to 11.

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On the Rez With David Treuer

There are hundreds of Indian reservations scattered across the United States. Some, such as the Navajo Nation and the Tohono O’odham Nation of Arizona, are the size of Connecticut. Others are postage stamps, just barely big enough to fit the by-now-inevitable casino. Some see tourists. Others see barely any traffic at all, Native American or otherwise.

Read more new and notable nonfiction this February.

David Treuer, a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California, has spent much of his life on the Leech Lake Reservation of Minnesota, not far from the Canadian border. In ...

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Of Books and Politics

“Conservatives in general aren’t readers.”

So says an old friend of mine, and without a hint of dismissiveness or presumption. He’s no liberal. Far from it: For many years he worked for William F. Buckley at the old-canon conservative National Review, and he continues to write and edit books and magazine pieces that are very firmly on the political right.

It may be that Americans of whatever political stripe aren’t readers these days, but the numbers speak to my friend’s point in at least one respect: Books by politicians from the left outsell those from the ...

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Gabrielle Giffords’ Story of Terrible Loss and Near-Miraculous Recovery

On Jan. 8, 2011, a lone gunman walked into a grocery store in Tucson, Ariz., and began firing. When he finished, just a few minutes into his rampage, five men and women and a 9-year-old girl lay dead. Thirteen others were wounded, including the gunman’s principal target, Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who had been holding a meet-your-congresswoman get-together that Saturday morning.

Our Best of 2011 Fiction list is out. Check out the best books of the year.

Anyone who saw the news that day remembers that Giffords—“Gabby” to her many friends and constituents—was at first reported among ...

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Bill Clinton: 10 Key Moments

Love him or hate him, Bill Clinton has been one of the most influential presidents and politicians on the world stage during the last two decades. Now, Clinton uses his savvy to attack one of the country’s most pressing problems—the economy. His latest book, Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy, focuses on fixing the current economic crisis, job creation and building a sound financial future. Here, we’ve assembled a list of 10 key moments from Clinton’s presidency, some good, some bad, but all reminders of why this guy usually has ...

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Chris Matthews on JFK

Chris Matthews is well known for his stints on TV news as a political commentator for MSNBC and the host of the NBC news program The Chris Matthews Show. Politics runs in his blood. In addition to working as a political journalist, he has served as a police officer on Capitol Hill, a staffer to Tip O’Neill and a speechwriter to Jimmy Carter, among many other jobs inside the Beltway.

Read more new and notable nonfiction this November.

Matthews can add storytelling to his list of gigs. In Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, he revels in his accomplished gift of ...

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Richard Dawkins: 'The Magic of Reality'

In 1976, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins came to international prominence with the publication of his book The Selfish Gene—which, among other things, introduced readers to the concept of the “meme.” Since, he has published such popular science books as The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable, to say nothing of his bestselling and thoroughly controversial book The God Delusion.

Read more new and notable nonfiction out this October.

His newest, The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True, finds Dawkins writing for a younger audience in a graphic book illustrated by Dave McKean. Here, he ...

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Lennon and the Cost of Fame

So it is that we have dozens of full-length biographies of Lennon and his bandmates in the Beatles. Joining them—and surpassing most of them in every imaginable way—is Tim Riley’s Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music—The Definitive Life. We caught up with Riley ...

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Reflecting on 9/11: ‘A Decade of Hope’

The 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 is upon us, and with it the culmination of a decade that has seen an outpouring of books on the events of that horrific day. Now, Dennis Smith offers another strong contribution, A Decade of Hope. Smith, the author of the now-classic Report from Engine Co. 82 and a longtime veteran of the New York Fire Department, interviewed survivors as well as family members and friends of those who died in the attacks, recounting their experiences from many points of view to bring together a book that we called “a ...

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Sally Jacobs on the Other Obama

Before there was Barack Obama, the intellectually supple, epoch-setting president of the United States, there was a brilliant young Kenyan economist, also named Barack Obama, his father. Yet the son never really knew his father—Obama Sr. left the family early in his son’s life, and he squandered his promise in a succession of failed political bids and, more damaging, a sea of drink. In many ways, he set only a negative example for his ambitious young son. But not for nothing did that son write a book called Dreams from My Father.

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Felix J. Palma: ‘The Map of Time’

Put H.G. Wells in a time machine and send him adrift. Insert characters from Wells’ own late Victorian day, among them the Elephant Man and Jack the Ripper. Add a love interest and some mayhem, and you have the makings of a potentially bizarre exercise in counterfactual history—and, as Felix Palma proves in The Map of Time, fine ingredients for a wild ride of a novel, equal parts history and imagination. We caught up with Palma long-distance at his home in Spain.

Read more books about time travel at Kirkus.

How did the idea for a novel concerning ...

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Sea Changes: Chilean Novelist Carlos Franz

On 9/11—that haunting date—in the now-distant year of 1973, a right-wing coup d’état backed by the government of the United States overthrew the democratically elected government of Chilean president Salvador Allende, an avowed socialist. Allende died. A week later, so did his friend Pablo Neruda, as well as the great Chilean singer and poet Victor Jara. A general named Augusto Pinochet came to power, backed by a powerful military, and for the next two decades supporters of the Allende regime disappeared, ever so quietly, into a homegrown Gulag. Chile went dark and quiet, its thriving literature ...

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David Mamet’s New Conservative Manifesto

Conservatives—for all their protests to the contrary—aren’t unheard of in Hollywood and never have been, from D.W. Griffith and Louis B. Mayer, to Mel Gibson and John Milius. Even so, for whatever reason, conservatives tend not to be the A-listers of film and the small screen—there are no Sean Penns or Brad Pitts among them, but instead the likes of Kelsey Grammer, Patricia Heaton, Stephen Baldwin, Chuck Norris and Bo Derek.

Read more David Mamet titles at Kirkus.

When an A-lister declares himself or herself to be a fellow traveler of the right wing, it ...

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A Survival Manual for the 21st-Century Planet

The climate of Earth is changing—indisputably, incontestably, incontrovertibly—though there are many who argue the proposition all the same. Against them comes Richard Alley’s Earth: The Operator's Manual, a companion volume to the PBS series of the same name, in which the professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University offers a user-friendly distillation of the vast body of science surrounding climate change and how we cope with it, willingly or not.

Read more earth-friendly books.

This book offers lots of evidence for climate change. For readers in a hurry, what’s the single most compelling argument?

The ...

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A Sea on Fire: Two Books Explore the Gulf Oil Disaster

On April 20, 2010, people the world over learned that oil platforms, like oil tankers, oil fields and oil barons, have names. That day, an offshore rig in the Gulf of Mexico, Deepwater Horizon, exploded. Eleven workers died. In subsequent days—and months afterward—Deepwater Horizon would fill the news with tales of dead and threatened fish, marine mammals and birds; of beachfront communities deserted by vacationers; of malfeasance and collusion. We learned of astonishing levels of corruption among the agencies charged with monitoring the oil industry, of corporate arrogance in the face of the “small people” and of round-robin ...

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David Foster Wallace and 'The Pale King'

On April 15—Tax Day, by a meaningful and by no means accidental coincidence—Little, Brown will publish David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King. It is whispered in writer-type circles that the book killed Wallace, and indeed getting the huge, unwieldy but always fascinating thing as far as he did clearly cost him emotionally and physically.

Read more reviews of David Foster Wallace's work. 

Yet, of course, David killed himself, and for many reasons that we can probably only begin to fathom.

I knew him slightly, 20-odd years ago, when I was working as an editor ...

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10 Reasons Why Rush Limbaugh is 'The Most Dangerous Man in America'

Rush Limbaugh has been promoted in the 15 years since Al Franken published Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot (Delacorte, 1996). (Come to think of it, so has Franken.) The dean of right-wing talk radio is now, John K. Wilson contends, guilty of crimes against society, truth and reason, making him, as the title of Wilson’s book has it, The Most Dangerous Man in America (Thomas Dunne). According to the book, here are 10 reasons why:

Limbaugh hates education for good reason—he dropped out of college after earning a D in communication. His instructor told him, “You ...

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Bruce Chatwin's Letters

Ostensibly a kind of travel book, with quaffs of philosophy, memoir and anthropology, and positioned as nonfiction, The Songlines was eventually revealed to have been a carefully constructed work of fiction—not a hoax, exactly, but not quite as represented. In the aftermath, Chatwin ...

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